Friday, November 27, 2015

Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam famously declared that our
excessive individualism had produced a society where people go bowling alone.
David Brooks wrote this morning that “we live in an individualistic age.”

In a multicultural world where people do not have the same
customs, the same manners and the same mores, it is inevitable that they feel alone and isolated. In a world where therapy has long touted the advantage
of getting touch with your own feelings, it is not surprising that people
suffer from anomie.

For some people it manifests itself as social anxiety. While
trying to glory in their transcendent individuality they feel anxious about
going out in public, about having to deal with other people. They fear these
encounters, perhaps because they expect to be greeted with hostility or even to
be ignored.

One suspects that psychiatrists have a pill for this, though
it is not obvious that the pill does anything more than allay the anxiety. It does
not get you up and out and into the social whirl.

Some therapists will tell you to activate your emotional
intelligence by getting in touch with your feelings and by trying to tune in to
the feelings of other people.

Of course, the more you introspect the more you will be
detaching yourself from other people. If the best you can do is to feel their
feelings and to want them to feel yours, you will be avoiding the commerce that
constitutes human interactions. Thus, you will be aggravating your condition,
not treating it.

Now, Melissa Dahl reports on new research that suggests a
not-too-surprising treatment for social anxiety: be nice to people.

But she does not really mean: being nice in the being nice
sense of the term. She means, as the researchers suggest, doing something nice
for someone else, doing what used to be called good works or good deeds.

We should not emphasize whether you
are or are not nice but whether you perform certain actions that count as nice.
Being and doing are not the same thing. If the best you can do is to be nice,
in the sense of having warm fuzzy nice feelings for people, then the treatment
will not work. But if you perform good deeds toward other people and do it
whether you feel it or not, you will benefit from the activity. You will
benefit more when you make it a habit.

You will see that I am faithfully presenting Dahl’s thought:

…social
psychologists at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University
recently found that when socially anxious people were encouraged to perform
little acts of kindness — doing a roommate's dishes, mowing a neighbor's lawn —
they reported less daily social anxiety one month after starting the little
experiment in niceness, when compared to others who did not undertake the
doing-good-deeds assignment.

Jennifer
L. Trew and Lynn E. Alden split 115 undergraduates into three groups: one that
would seek out ways to be kind to others; another that would confront their
social anxiety by doing the very things that made them nervous (like striking
up a conversation with their neighbor, or asking someone to join them for
lunch), in a kind of exposure therapy; and a final group that served as the
control condition, who were told to keep a record of their daily lives for one
month….

In the
end, the people who had focused on kindness for the month experienced the
biggest drops in social anxiety, when compared to the exposure group and the
control group; the kindness group also reported bigger drops in avoidance after
the duration of the experiment.

One would have expected that the exposure group would also
experience a drop in social anxiety, but it makes sense that they did not
improve as much as did those who made a habit of doing acts of kindness. It’s
not so much about overcoming fear as learning how to interact with other people
on the most simple level.

Also importantly, people who focus on themselves, who ponder
their emotions, who get in touch with their feelings, who work on themselves,
become more anxious. You might even believe that certain forms of therapy are
designed to produce social anxiety.

Dahl concludes:

Previous
research has indicated that there is a kind of symbiotic relationship
between self-focused attention and social anxiety, in that anxiety makes people
more likely to draw their focus inward — likewise, focusing on yourself seems
to increase anxiety. This new finding may point to a way out of that vicious,
anxious circle. Doing small good deeds for other people naturally turns your
focus outward, which may leave less room for obsessive self-reflection.

The funny thing is: there is nothing new about this idea. Western
religions have been recommending this for millennia. One suspects that social
anxiety is one of the prices of an increasingly secularized world.

As for the religious basis, note Proverbs 21:3:

To do
what is right and just is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice.

And Jesus said in Matthew 5.16:

Let
your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify
your Father which is in heaven.

And from the Epistle to James 2:24:

Ye see
then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.

Of course, these precepts have been subject to controversy.
Debates have raged about whether good deeds or faith put you on the path to
Heaven. Perhaps we can agree that doing good deeds toward other people produces
a sense of community and works because it fulfills another Biblical injunction:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

After all, your kind gesture toward another person makes it
far more likely that the other person will reciprocate with a kind gesture. One
understands that not everyone returns favors, but if you make enough kind
gestures you will likely to find other people to be more welcoming. They will
look forward to seeing you, not dread your presence.

This suggests that those who withdraw from the world to
contemplate their feelings are sending out a “don’t tread on me” signal to others.
Their social anxiety might reflect unfriendly looks and gestures they receive
when they refuse to interact with other people. For all we know they might have
more control than they think over how they are received in society.

Arthur Brooks makes some similar points in a column he
penned for Thanksgiving. He too recommends that you make kind gestures and do
good deeds regardless of whether or not you are feeling kind, nice or grateful.
And he suggests making it a habit.

He writes:

Make
gratitude a routine, independent of how you feel — and not just once each
November, but all year long.

What deeds would count as kind. Brooks lists some:

Next,
move to “exterior gratitude,” which focuses on public expression. The
psychologist Martin Seligman, father of the field known as “positive
psychology,” gives some practical suggestions on how to do this. In his best
seller “Authentic Happiness,” he recommends that readers systematically express
gratitude in letters to loved ones and colleagues. A disciplined way to put
this into practice is to make it as routine as morning coffee. Write two short
emails each morning to friends, family or colleagues, thanking them for what
they do.

We should understand that different relationships
with different people require different gestures of gratitude. It helps that the recipients of said
emails have actually done something to deserve the gratitude. Yet, Seligman and
Brooks are saying that the good deeds need not be extravagant. They need merely
be nice… like bringing your wife flowers for no reason. One understands that giving flowers to female colleague does not mean the same thing.

Brooks continues, advising us not to follow our feelings:

This
Thanksgiving, don’t express gratitude only when you feel it. Give thanks
especially when you don’t feel it. Rebel against the emotional “authenticity”
that holds you back from your bliss.

4 comments:

I like Brooks' openning paragraph from Dunkelman about "middle-ring community organizations" and see that's where its easiest to neglect, people close enough to get to know well enough to make a difference, while you don't need each other. Its easy to see we need SOME organizing FORCE is needed to encourage random interactions where you might learn something close to home there you have something to give.

On the other side, I dislike Stuart's regular disparaging of introspection, as if this is just a selfish activity, like ruminating on how badly people are treating them, or some such projective imaginings. I'd prefer to disparage the spell of mass-media if I want to explain why we're more detatched than times past.

I like the word kindness more than niceness, at least everyone knows "Minnesota nice" means more an inward-facing sentimentality towards safety and refusal to acknowledge difference to anyone's face, with no clear duty for inconvenient good deeds to strangers.

I think we need to acknowledge that kindness isn't always easy, at least it requires a different sort of attention than a society of consumers and looking for the best parking lots for the black friday deals.

If you go by Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, apparently you need some exposure full existential fear to really know what kindness mean, or what gratitude is really worth.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

p.s. I'm not sure what the best advice is, but when there's two people named with the same last name, here David and Arthur Brooks, it looks like a first name initial is helpful for clarity, for a blog, and comments. (Myself I was referring to David Brooks article reference at the top, while Arthur's quotes at the end are great too.)

People with social anxiety are often meek and subservient because they have an irrational fear of being hurt by other people.

Volunteering to do work for a social organization provides a way to meet and relate to people from the within the safety of a structured role. You don't have to initiate a conversation or maintain a relationship yourself; the job does it for you.

You might learn to fear people less once you've had a chance - via the role - to see them close up. However, the method you have used to meet people is just a different version of the servile role you felt safe in before. It is a product of your social anxiety and the limits it imposes on your behaviour rather than a clear way beyond it.

Sooner or later someone with social anxiety is probably going to have to analyze the situation and figure out that their fear is unreasonable. This will involve the self-analysis that you believe is a cause of social anxiety rather than a way out of it.

I've heard this reaching-out theory before and honestly I have to get behind it, at least for some anxiety sufferers. It's not just the reaching out and actively being social part, it's the helpful part...it brings things down to: hey, the next person isn't perfect either - the world isn't one big bad place of people who all know what they're doing whereas I don't. Rather, it's: *everyone* can use a hand once in a while. IMO that's tremendously helpful. Mel at clearpanicaway